Blitzed!
Steve Strange Orion, 207pp, £16.99
ISBN 0752847201
Blitzed! is a compelling document from a time of rapid social and political transformation in Britain. When I was an adolescent, idling my way through empty days in the suburban drablands of the Essex/east London borders, Steve Strange was a figure of considerable wonder. He was one of the founders of the Blitz nightclub, from where innumerable singers, artists, fashion designers, style journalists and musicians, including Boy George and Spandau Ballet, emerged in the late 1970s. Blitz occupied a small, cramped basement in Covent Garden. To enter the club, you had to negotiate your way past Strange on the door; he once correctly turned away the ridiculous Mick Jagger for arriving dressed in a baseball cap and trainers. You also had to look different, extravagantly different, which meant dressing up, wearing make-up and experimenting with gender roles (and yes, you guessed it: that was just the boys). Those bands that were inspired by the Blitz crowd were later packaged and promoted as New Romantics or futurists; but there was nothing calculating about the early pioneers of the scene: they were sincerely, uninhibitedly weird.
I was far too young ever to have attempted to visit Blitz, but I read all about its legacy in style magazines such as The Face, Zig-Zag and i-D. This was a time of rapid change in British youth culture. A libertarian punk attitude was being fused with a Thatcherite, consensus-breaking entrepreneurism to create an entirely new social phenomenon, the style-driven nightclub. Before Strange and his collaborators came along, the nightclub as currently understood did not really exist: there were only discos and pubs. (Several of the early Blitz crowd, such as Jeremy Healy, are today among the leading club DJs of the world.)
Blitz called itself the club for heroes, after the great Bowie track, and there was indeed something heroic about the posturing and ambition of the young people who gathered there, most of whom were from tough working-class families and had long since dropped out of school, abandoning all hope of a conventional career. The anarchic energy of the punk scene had liberated them into rebellion: where once perhaps only football, boxing or crime offered a way out from the low-horizoned impoverishment of their inheritance - the pit, the factory, the building site - the future was becoming an index of thrilling possibilities. They seized the day.
Strange himself grew up in North and South Wales, and his earliest dreams were of escaping from the closed, stunted world in which he moved: the monotony, the social deprivation. It is hard now to recall just how drab and defeated Britain was in the 1970s, that wretched decade of strikes and power cuts, of football violence and casual racism, of macho unionism and rampant inflation, of charmless class conformity and bad food. There was Bowie and Roxy Music; and later in the decade, Kraftwerk from Germany began making strange and difficult "electronic" music using the new technology of the synthesizer. But on the whole, before punk smashed the social consensus, there was not much to look forward to if you were young and born outside the metropolitan loop.
Strange writes well about his early trips to the northern soul clubs of north-west England and how they left him restlessly longing for London. In the end, after failing to fulfil his potential at school, he arrived in the capital at the age of 17, relying on what he calls the "social support system" of fellow punks to provide accommodation. His early months there were marked by great unhappiness, as he wandered from one miserable squat to another. "There were times when I was at death's door. It was hard living on £11 a week dole money, and unsettled too, moving from sofa to sofa . . . It was only really one step up from being homeless." Once established on the punk scene, he began experimenting with music, sex and drugs - the usual things. Together with Rusty Egan, with whom he later co-founded the band Visage, he set up their first nightclub, Bowie Night at Billy's in Soho. On 6 February 1979, Bowie Night moved to a new venue, a wine bar in Covent Garden. Blitz was born.
The years 1979 to 1983 were Steve Strange's time, his belle epoque. Visage was internationally successful, and in 1982 he opened a new club, the Camden Palace, described by Boy George as a "tacky deco-style posers' parlour", which I used to attend while still at school. Thursday night was best, when Strange would be on the door and Rusty Egan spinning the records. You would have to dress at your most outrageous simply to get in and then, when the club closed, spend dead hours hanging around the streets because you had missed the last train back to the suburbs.
Strange was never much of a singer. He was, however, a good frontman for the concept studio band Visage, which also featured Midge Ure and Billy Currie from Ultravox. Only one Visage track transcends its time, their debut single with Polydor, "Fade to Grey" (1980), which, with its heavy electronic backing track, retains its startling capacity to surprise and to place an era exactly. Many of the best electronic or "futurist" bands of that period - Japan, the early Human League, Talk Talk, Joy Division/New Order, the Visage of "Fade to Grey" - were the pop stars of their time, the equivalent of, say, the wretched Westlife or Robbie Williams. But they could not have been more different from the overproduced, synthetic, corporate trash that is today's pop music - they had a rawness and spirit, an interest in new technology and a frame of reference, influence and ambition that was genuinely innovative. These young people wanted to make records; the pop stars of today want only to be celebrities, part of mainstream popular culture.
Steve Strange - like Boy George and Marc Almond and many other young creative people who had too much too young - eventually declined into depression and chronic heroin addiction. He survived, but only just, and this memoir is a cautionary tale, a work of a man struggling to rebuild his life and shattered confidence.
Boy George, in his memoir Take It Like a Man, spoke of the arrogance and hauteur of the young Strange: "He lorded it on the door [of Blitz], making us wait while he turned away some poor freak from the sticks . . . Steve was so superior: one week he was your best friend, the next he'd stare straight through you." He also criticised Strange for being attracted to dissolute aristocrats such as Francesca von Thyssen, who later married the great-nephew of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Sabrina Guinness. But there's very little that is boastful here, and much that is pitiful and self- lacerating: Strange was so poor, at one stage, that he took to delivering prostitutes' cards to phone boxes. Blitzed! is best read alongside the memoirs of Boy George and Marc Almond's Tainted Life, a trilogy of books about social mobility and the unpredictable spirit of working-class culture which can also be read as a parable of the Thatcher years - a journey from radicalism and hope to inevitable disillusionment.
Jason Cowley is the author of Unknown Pleasures (Faber and Faber)
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